Latency-Rate servers & Dataflow models

In the signal processing domain, dataflow graphs [2] [10] and their associated analysis techniques are a well-accepted modeling paradigm. The vertices of a dataflow graph represent functionality and are called actors, while the edges model which actors communicate with each other. Traditionally, these actors have been scheduled in a static order or in a fully static fashion [9] [16]. However, for firm real-time applications, run-time scheduling is required if there are tasks, that operate on different streams and share the same resource, for which either the execution time or the execution rate is unknown or impractical to bound.